On April 26 1986, millions of homes on the eastern half of the US were tuning in to the spy drama The Falcon and the Snowman.
It was being broadcast on HBO, but not for long. Soon after midnight on the 27th, the picture flickered and changed. The SMPTE color bars appeared along with a message:
GOODEVENING HBO
FROM CAPTAIN MIDNIGHT
$12.95/MONTH ?
NO WAY !
[SHOWTIME/MOVIE CHANNEL BEWARE!]
This weird interruption only lasted 4 1/2 minutes, but it had big consequences.
The next day, network news picked up the story. People around the country got to jabbering about the unfairness of HBO’s prices. HBO was furious, and they put pressure on the FCC to catch Captain Midnight, whoever he was.
Several months and an investigative manhunt later, that’s just what happened.
In July of that year, Captain Midnight was arrested and exposed as a 25-year-old electrical engineer named John MacDougall. He lived in Ocala, Florida. He had a part-time job there at the Central Florida Teleport satellite uplink station.
But what was MacDougall’s motivation for this stunt?
Was he a modern-day Robin Hood?
Had he been planning this for months?
Turns out, MacDougall had a satellite dish installation business. He’d been doing real well for a few years. But then, HBO (and other paid cable channels) started giving satellite dish owners the shaft. Instead of getting HBO for free, satellite dish owners now had to pay $500 for a decoder box plus $12.95 a month.
So people stopped buying satellite dishes. MacDougall’s business tanked. He was miffed. And so, while monitoring the satellite uplink of Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, he made an impulsive decision.
He pulled up the character generator and typed up the above message. Once Pee-wee’s Big Adventure finished, he pointed the giant 30-foot dish straight at the Galaxy 1 satellite. And he jammed Transponder 23, which carried the eastern feed of HBO.
“I had no animus and I had no malice in my heart,” said MacDougall. “It was the act of a frustrated individual who was trying to get his point across to people who didn’t seem to listen.”
I thought this story was interesting. Almost as interesting as Richard Armstrong’s How to Talk Anybody into Anything. That’s the little book Richard wrote about 44 points he learned by studying con artists. Point 3 is about how con artists choose their marks:
“Look for intelligent, emotional & impulsive people”
That’s good to remember and easy to forget. Because when you’re writing direct response copy, you might feel like you have people’s inner motivations at the tips of your fingers. You might feel you can manipulate them into doing what you want. You might even feel your prospects are gullible nincompoops.
But they are not. At least if they are good prospects, like Richard Armstrong says. In order to sell big with direct marketing, you want to write to people like Captain Midnight. Intelligent, frustrated, lacking a feeling of control.
“The customer is not a moron,” said David Ogilvy. “She’s your wife.” But let me finish the story of Captain Midnight.
In the following months, HBO devised a system to identify unauthorized uplink transmissions. Congress passed a new law, which made satellite hijacking a felony. But MacDougall was charged under the old law, with just a misdemeanor, and got away with a $5,000 fine.
He still lives and works in Ocala, FL, where he continues to make an excellent prospect for bizop offers. As for his legacy, MacDougall says,
“I do not regret trying to get the message out to corporate America about unfair pricing and restrictive trade practices. That was the impetus for doing what I did; that’s the reason I jammed HBO; that’s the reason I sent them a polite message.”